The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “all the world must . . . graze on Hellebore” The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton (1577-1640) is an epic, encyclopedic exploration of melancholy that covers, as its subtitle explains, What it is: With All the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of It. In Three Maine Partitions with their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up. After a 100+ page introduction in which Burton gives an overview of melancholy and his approach to it, the first “Partition” covers the causes and symptoms of melancholy, the second details the cures of melancholy, and the third explores a particular branch of it, love melancholy, followed by a section on religious melancholy. Burton says that he wrote his book because 1) everyone in the world suffers from melancholy at some point, and 2) he would like to relieve his own melancholy by writing about it. His basic advice is to live with moderation in all things, including eating, drinking, fasting, dancing, exercising, studying, physic taking, love, marriage, venery, and chastity. Why should you read The Anatomy of Melancholy, which runs for fifty-five hours of Elizabethan prose in the Ukemi audiobook? Well, here are five reasons: 1. You’ll learn something of the history of medicine and science, philosophy, and literature etc. 2. You’ll savor the absurd things people have believed for thousands of years and nod at the fundamental, persisting human truths. 3. You’ll confirm the value of moderation. 4. You’ll marvel at the melancholic obsession of Burton, an Oxford university divine who was a voracious reader endowed with a superhuman memory. 5. You’ll enjoy Burton’s Elizabethan writing, his wit, style, digressions, lists, long sentences, and language. Burton is perhaps more of a compiler, summarizer, and assessor than an original thinker, modestly saying of his MANY sources, “I light my candle from their torches.” He writes his book around quotations from and references to the likes of Homer, Euripides, Aristophanes, Xenophon, Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch, Apollonius, Herodotus, Ptolemy, Horace, Pliny, Livy, Petrarch, Virgil, Tacitus, Ovid, Suetonius, the Bible, Hercules de Saxonia, Melancthon, Galen, Heraclitus, Paracelsus, Augustine, Avicenna, Boethius, Bacon, Savonarola, St Jerome, Machiavelli, Boccaccio, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Ariosto, Chaucer, More, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, a who's who of scholars, philosophers, historians, astronomers, scientists, church leaders, and writers from ancient till Elizabethan times. Burton was an omnivorous reader, his approach exhaustive: “I had rather repeat things ten times than omit anything of value.” Indeed, because the causes and symptoms of melancholy are often the same, as in fear or sorrow, he does repeat ideas and examples. As he goes about citing ancients, Muslims, various types of Christians, and so on, he seems to believe almost anything he’s read or at least is willing to entertain its possibility. He treats literary, mythological, biblical, legendary, historical, and contemporary figures and examples with equal attention, almost as if they’re all part of the same world with the same ontological status--though he sure often remembers that he’s an Anglican Christian. All that makes his book an interesting window on beliefs and knowledge of the Elizabethan age. Some causes of melancholy (e.g., witches and magicians) and some cures (e.g., anointing your teeth with the earwax of a dog) that he cites are absurd today, but the symptoms he explains and the sympathy he evinces for them, as well as his immersion in the infinite and diverse field and his heroic attempt to categorize it are all impressive and enriching. There is common sense (e.g., “corrupt fantasy” in imagination, fear and sorrow may lead to melancholy) to go with the nonsense (e.g., melancholy may be cured by bleeding with strategically applied cuts or leeches). And much of the nonsense is entertaining, as when he explains the short lives of sparrows by their salacity or gives an instance of a man "that went reeling and staggering all the days of his life . . . because his mother being great with child saw a drunken man reeling in the street." He is prey to many of the prejudices and stereotypes of his era and culture, as when he says that the (native) “Americans” are devil worshipers or that “Germany hath not so many drunkards, England tobacconists, France dancers, Holland mariners, as Italy alone hath jealous husbands.” He has his pet bête noires, like litigious lawyers, mountebank doctors, greedy apothecaries, trencher chaplains, carpet knights, counterfeiting politicians, epicures, atheists, idolaters, popes, monks, spendthrifts, prodigals, ambidexters, cooks, and onions. Although susceptible to the misogynistic bent of his era, he realizes that if women are bad, men are worse. I LOVE Burton’s lists! When he gets rolling and riffing on something, I start by smiling, end by chortling, and marvel at the fecundity of his pen. For example, when he heads off criticism of his book by listing his writerly flaws: “And for those other faults of barbarism, Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgment, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, fantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry; I confess all ('tis partly affected), thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.” Or when he riffs on how melancholic we become if anyone messes with our stuff: “If our pleasures be interrupt, we can tolerate it: our bodies hurt, we can put it up and be reconciled: but touch our commodities, we are most impatient: fair becomes foul, the graces are turned to harpies, friendly salutations to bitter imprecations, mutual feastings to plotting villainies, minings and counterminings; good words to satires and invectives, we revile e contra, nought but his imperfections are in our eyes, he is a base knave, a devil, a monster, a caterpillar, a viper, a hog-rubber, &c.” Or when he rolls on the difficulties of living happily in the world: “In a word, the world itself is a maze, a labyrinth of errors, a desert, a wilderness, a den of thieves, cheaters, &c., full of filthy puddles, horrid rocks, precipitiums, an ocean of adversity, an heavy yoke, wherein infirmities and calamities overtake, and follow one another, as the sea waves; and if we scape Scylla, we fall foul on Charybdis, and so in perpetual fear, labour, anguish, we run from one plague, one mischief, one burden to another, duram servientes servitutem, and you may as soon separate weight from lead, heat from fire, moistness from water, brightness from the sun, as misery, discontent, care, calamity, danger, from a man.” I enjoyed Burton's evident pleasure in talking about love. He gets excited while citing seduction scenarios featuring age gaps, incest, beauty, fashion, conversation, nudity, eye-contact, kissing (lip-biting and mouth sucking!), touching (pap caressing!), singing, dancing (the engine of burning lust!), gift giving/promising, lying, crying, etc. He relishes declaiming “farewell!” etc. while channeling lovesick lovers, whether fearful or sorrowful, joyful or tragic, male or female, old or young, mortal or divine, Biblical or classical, historical or contemporary, fictional or real. In addition to being an incredibly well-read bachelor scholar and divine, he was, after all, a man. When he criticizes war and “heroes,” I sense a kindred spirit: "They commonly call the most hair-brain blood-suckers, strongest thieves, the most desperate villains, treacherous rogues, inhuman murderers, rash, cruel and dissolute caitiffs, courageous and generous spirits, heroical and worthy captains, brave men at arms, valiant and renowned soldiers, possessed with a brute persuasion of false honour." Some words about the Ukemi audiobook. First, it’s superbly read by the John Geilgud-esque Peter Wickham, who reads everything with understanding, pleasure, and wit. Second, the audiobook translates into English Burton’s MANY Greek and Latin phrases and quotations, which makes it much easier to “read” what he wrote by listening to the book than by reading it in a physical form. When Burton inserts into an English sentence, “insanum bellum?” the audiobook translates it as “is not war madness?” When he writes, “novices, illiterate, Eunuchi sapientiæ,” the audiobook replaces the Latin with “eunuchs of wisdom.” Experts in Greek or Latin may be irritated by this aid to the average reader, but I appreciate it. Actually, Burton himself often adds an English translation for his Latin phrases (e.g., “Besides, I might not well refrain, for ubi dolor, ibi digitus, one must needs scratch where it itches”). Other times, as when he gains momentum on a list in the “vulgar” English tongue, he tends to insert a Latin element or two, so you can kind of understand what he means from the context. Finally, the audiobook begins with two scholarly introductions about the book and its author. Paul Jordan Smith calls The Anatomy an entertaining masterpiece that influenced writers like Johnson, Milton, Sterne, and Keats, and says, “It's a bit of a cosmos, a compendium of poetry, medicine, philosophy, philology, theology, climatology, old wives tales, politics, utopia, satire, magic, and more. It celebrates all of the earth and all of the human moods as it anatomizes melancholy.” Floyd Dell then describes the book as “an analysis of morbid psychology, with an artistic interest, by a reclusive bookworm” who “grew up in the age of Shakespeare, and … was interested in our eccentricities” and “unreason.” You really should read it! View all my reviews
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